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Friendships, an important form of people’s everyday relationships with others, have been studied by many scholars from different disciplines. However, there is limited research on friendship in the context of childhood, particularly that of Chinese rural children. This chapter presents findings from an in-depth study on Chinese children’s understandings and experiences of friendships with peers in the context of a rural primary boarding school. Data for this research were collected through an intensive five-month study, using an ethnographic approach, in a rural primary boarding school (given the pseudonym ‘Central Primary School’) in the western area of China in 2016. This chapter discusses parents’ influences on children’s selection of friends, particularly their ‘good’ friends, and their understandings of the functions of making friends in the context of rural China. It unpacks parents’ interventions on children’s friendships by discussing the moralised hierarchical relationship between children and their parents – children are expected to show obedience to parents. Then, it argues that the Confucian-collectivist values construct a relationship between a child’s individual achievement and their family’s collective good, which makes friendship not only an individual issue but also a collective one too.

This paper aims to investigate farmers' willingness to adopt new rice varieties and the factors influencing their seed‐selection behaviors.

The Logit model was used to analyze farmers' willingness and the determinants of the behaviors in selecting and using new varieties. A total of 402 farming households in the main rice‐producing areas of Sichuan Province were surveyed.

The results indicate that rice yield and sales, agro‐technicians' popularization, kith and kin's seed purchase behaviors have a positive impact on farmers'choice, while the present production income has a negative effect. But previous seed purchasing behaviors, soil characteristics, media publicity, seed companies' recommendation and age of farmer have either positive or negative impact on farmers' choice.

The paper is however unable to explain the general situation of China so it considers Sichuan province as a case. Increased sample quantities may be necessary in further research.

The paper proposes an hypothesis of farmers' willingness and determinants in choosing new rice varieties and verifies it by Logit model. It first analyzes the farmers'decision‐making behavior in choosing new rice varieties in Sichuan, and investigates the farmers' behavior more scientifically.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine student interns’ experience by considering perceived value, satisfaction and loyalty in the context of the Disney College Program internship experience for international students. The study incorporates the perceived value of the learning experience based on the interrelationships with satisfaction and loyalty intentions for students from various hospitality colleges in Korea and China.

Asian university students who had completed an international internship experience responded to a post-internship survey. The survey gauged the students’ perception of their internship experience, overall satisfaction, loyalty intentions and value dimensions. The proposed model was estimated by using partial least squares path modeling.

The findings of the hypotheses testing show that the value interns get and give is a significant indicator of satisfaction and loyalty intentions. The value of an international internship experience, especially the get component, has a significant effect on the students’ loyalty intentions for their international internship experience and satisfaction with their experience. Overall, students demonstrate a high degree of attitudinal loyalty.

No other study has examined international student interns’ value, satisfaction and loyalty intentions perceptions of the Disney College Program internship program. Students’ loyalty is expressed mainly as favorable word of mouth for their university and the internship program. They recommend not only their university but also the international internship program in which they participated. They also recommend the internship university to other students.

Traditional bank selection criteria considered important by many bankers may be less important factors in the oriental culture. A mail questionnaire survey in Singapore with a sample of 87 subjects reveals that social factors are a stronger influence than other variables, probably due to the fact that social and other family ties are closer in oriental culture, and that consumers are more vulnerable to advice from friends, neighbours and family members. Friendly service is important when social factors are not taken into account. Location is not a dominant factor since Singapore is a small city and most banks are conveniently located. From these results bank marketers can develop advertising that stresses the family or friend concept.

Followee recommendation is a problem rapidly gaining importance in Twitter as well as in other micro-blogging communities. To find interesting users to follow, most recommendation systems leverage different factors such as graph topology or user-generated content, among others. Those systems mostly disregard, however, the effect of psychological characteristics, such as personality, over the followee selection process. As personality is considered one of the primary factors that influence human behaviour, the purpose of this paper is to shed some light on the impact of personality traits on followee selection.

The authors performed a data analysis comparing the similarity among Twitter users and their followees regarding personality traits. The authors analysed three different similarity measures. First, the authors computed an overall similarity considering the five personality traits or dimensions of the Five-Factor model as a whole. Second, the authors computed the dimension-to-dimension similarity considering each individual personality trait independently of each other. Third, the authors computed a cross-dimension similarity considering each personality dimension in relation to the others.

This study showed that personality should be considered as a distinctive factor in the process of followee selection. However, personality dimensions should not be analysed as a whole as the overall personality similarity might not accurately assess the actual matching between individuals. Instead, the performed data analysis showed the existence of relations among the individual dimensions. Thus, the importance of considering each personality trait with respect to others is stated.

This study is among the firsts to study the impact of personality, one of the primary factors that influence human behaviour and social relationships, in the selection of followees in micro-blogging communities.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects that reference prices and associated information sources (websites that consumers use to explore and their friends who have similar perspectives on value) have on deal evaluation and intention to disseminate electronic word of mouth (eWOM).

A stratified survey is conducted to empirically test the relations between reference prices, associated information sources (the top five Consumer-to-consumer (C2C) websites and top five Facebook friends with similar perspectives and values on consumption), deal evaluation, and eWOM intention. The study uses a Facebook API to help participants pick five Facebook friends to act as their favorite sources for advice on shopping.

The results suggest that consumers’ deal evaluations (as shaped by the recency effects of previous exposure to prices and the influence of Facebook friends and C2C websites) have carry-over effects on their eWOM intentions. The influence of Facebook friends and C2C websites on deal evaluation is as powerful as that of reference price, especially concerning the mean and the lowest prices.

The findings encourage marketers to invest their resources in targeting online groups, and suggest that C2C website marketers should set their offer prices between the mean and the lowest prices.

This study extends prior research on the motives for eWOM dissemination and elaborates an approach to initiate eWOM intention through deal evaluation.

Presents the findings of a survey of undergraduates on bank selection preferences. In the study, nine criteria for bank selection decision and five banks are identified, and the decision problem is structured into a three‐level hierarchy using the Analytic Hierarchy Process. The findings indicate that undergraduates place high emphasis on the pricing and product dimensions of bank services. The results are of interest to bank managers because they provide information on the importance of the selection criteria as well as areas of strengths and weaknesses of banks.

The aim of this paper is to investigate bank choice/selection criteria in a range of cultural and country economic scenarios. More specifically, the purpose of this study is to understand international consumers' selection criteria of banks using the USA, Taiwan, and Ghana as illustrations.

Following a literature review, the paper adopts the classical multi‐step scale development process which demanded that thorough attention be paid to every step of the process. The study employed exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses to assess the reliability of the results.

The study reveals three key dimensions/factors/strategies that are consistent across all three economies. The paper concludes that open and liberalized business climate appear to explain consumers' decisions.

This research is based on the college student cohort and thus the results do not represent the public. This poses generalizability questions without further replications and validations. This study did not examine whether there were consumers' switching behaviors involving banks.

Insights derived from this study will provide bank managers and advertising executives with the building blocks for understanding consumers' choice criteria of banks in industrialized, newly industrialized and liberalized developing economies.

A comprehensive validated scale measuring international consumers' selection of banks is proposed. In view of the scarce stream of empirical studies dealing with consumers' selection of banks in liberalized developing nations, this research comes at an opportune time, as several governments in these economies are encouraging bank savings, channeling college students' loans through bank accounts and proactively attracting global banks to establish branches in their countries. This study complements the extant literature dealing with consumers' selection of banks. Finally, a cross‐national and cross‐cultural dataset of consumers' choice criteria of banks have been put forward that would enhance further appreciation of the subject of banks selection in varying economies.

This study tests the influence of Big Five Personality Traits (BFPTs) and demographic factors on Facebook behavior of Posting, Feature Usage, and Making Friends in India, home to the highest number of Facebook users in the world. Gen-Z is the demographic most involved in social media, thus this age group’s behavior can be most accurately gauged from Facebook habits and so it forms the basis of this study. Facebook behavior identified in this study was the outcome of an elicitation study conducted among university students. The sample survey consisted of 290 Facebook users aged between 17 and 24 years. The chapter uses factor analysis and structural equation modeling (SEM) for data analysis. Results revealed that extroverts and those open to experiences would post more. Meanwhile, the conscientious were less inclined to use features such as emoticons while those more agreeable embraced them. Women and those more neurotic would not befriend strangers. Also, posting and feature usage increased with user age. Study results highlight the potential of analyzing Facebook behavior to gauge personalities, which could benefit recruiters and marketers. Academically, this is the first study related to India where a scale for Facebook behavior is developed (namely Posting, Feature Usage, and Making Friends) and then validated for future research work.

In studies related to education, sociology and economics, the relationship between students’ social relationships and their academic performance is one of the most important research topics; a large number of research studies have focused on it. This study aims to analyze the previous studies about social interaction and academic performance and attempts to reveal the underlying mechanism.

This study uses CiteSpace to analyze 1,843 articles on social relationships and academic performance from 2001 to 2019. According to the co-cited literature network results in CiteSpace, this study proposes an adapted conceptual framework of the relationship between social relationships and academic performance. This paper further examines more studies about the two most-cited articles in the co-cited literature network for better understanding.

From the results of the co-cited literature network, this study determines that school engagement is an important mediator between social relationships and academic performance. This paper further examines studies on school engagement and determine that, along with the self-determination theory, school engagement is influenced by multiple components of self-determination theory: autonomy, competence and relatedness.

According to the visual result in CiteSpace, this study examines a research trend in which researchers scholars start to conduct micro and detailed empirical research on the impact of the specific social networks on academic performance because of the progress of information technology. Therefore, based on the previous literature that we have analyzed, this study predicts that the trend of using information technology, such as data mining or data analysis, in this academic field will become a mainstream practice in the future.